Books every Green Bay Packers’ fan should read

GREEN BAY — It was every bit as miserable on the streets of Green Bay Thursday as it was in Milwaukee, with the snow falling and the wind blowing, making a local bookstore an oasis from the storm. The stacks at the Reader’s Loft are full of books about Green Bay’s history and culture, so of course, there’s an entire section devoted to the Green Bay Packers.

“Books by and about these people are held to a pretty high standard here,” Craig Jones said.

The cliche “storied franchise” is thrown around a little too often in Green Bay, but there are always new stories being written about the franchise. “One or two every season. Some of them come and go, you know, drop like a rock,” Jones said.

So FOX6’s Ted Perry asked bookseller Craig Jones for a list of books every Packers’ fan should read. First up: Jerry Kramer’s “Instant Replay.” “The thing about books about the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay is that a lot of people in this town have met these guys, and partied with them,” Jones said.

The early days of football are described in “Before They Were The Packers.” “This is a good work of regional history,” Jones said.

Fascinated with Lombardi? Then you have to get “When Pride Still Mattered,” by David Maraniss. “This is an accurate portrayal of Lombardi, who was a pretty complicated man,” Jones said.

The 1962 Packers are the subject of “The First America’s Team,” by Bob Berghaus. “Everybody is in the business of counting how many Super Bowls you’ve won, and this is when they were the championship team, before there was a Super Bowl,” Jones said.

One of the most recent entries is “Incomplete Passes,” written by a woman who came of age during the Lombardi era. “Her dream of having a Packers player fall in love with her is probably not ever going to happen now, so she thought she would write a book about her memories of that,” Jones said.